Duquesne Talk Centers on Consequences of Global Climate Change

There’s little debate left among scientists that climate change is real and that the Earth is experiencing some of its effects already. To what extent, and to what extent further changes can be affected is up for debate. The head of the National Wildlife Federation will deliver a talk Tuesday evening in Pittsburgh, “Living in a New Climate Paradigm.”

“The sub-title of his talk, “Welcome to the Idiocene,” is a play on a thing like Anthropocene and Holocene, the scientific terms for big ages in the history of the age, the geologic ages, except it’s sort of giving us a heads up, in that the Idiocene is where we seem to have put ourselves because we’re not taking the climate challenge seriously enough,” said Stan Kalaba, associate director of the Center for Environmental Research and Education (CERE) at Duquesne University.

NWF’s Larry Schweiger, a Pittsburgh native, argues that humans have delayed climate action for so long that the planet is now entering a period of climate consequences. The jury is still out on that one.

“There are those who say, ‘we’ve really got to act to cut greenhouse gasses in order to forestall major, perhaps catastrophic, climate change,’ and there are those who say, ‘it’s already in motion, the trends are only increasing, and the best we can do is adapt, adjust, and make the best of things,’” said Kabala.

Schweiger’s talk is part of the 20th anniversary celebration of the Bayer School’s CERE, the talk is free and open to the public. It takes place Tuesday evening at 6pm in the Pappert Lecture Hall of Duquesne’s Bayer Learning Center.